


The Purest Expression of Grief

by LourdesDeath



Series: Somewhere For This, Death and Guns [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Author was being overly poetic again, Catholic Bucky Barnes, Catholic Steve Rogers, Hozier, Multi, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 07:40:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4470908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LourdesDeath/pseuds/LourdesDeath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve’s tired of everyone telling him he isn’t responsible for this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Purest Expression of Grief

**Author's Note:**

> [My sister](http://archiveofourown.org/users/KeitanKetsueki/works) requested I write more of the Hozier fic.
> 
> "Wondering who I copy,  
> Mustering some tender charm,  
> She feels no control of her body,  
> She feels no safety in my arms.
> 
> I've no language left to say it,  
> But all I do is quake to her,  
> Breaking if I try convey it,  
> The broken love I make to her.
> 
> All that I've been taught,  
> And every word I've got,  
> Is foreign to me.
> 
> Screaming the name of a foreigner's god,  
> The purest expression of grief."  
> -Hozier, [Foreigner's God](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wy15IvvQxQ)

Steve’s fingers are starting to ache. His nails, blackened with dirt, are torn and broken. He took his gloves off before he started digging, he needs to be able to feel everything he touches, needs to know if he finds anything.

\--

The base was empty, but it hadn’t been for long. The concrete floor was stained with blood. Piles of corpses were scattered throughout the building.

None of the footage from the security cameras had been wiped, so Steve and Sam found the tapes from a week ago and started from there.

Three days ago, the Winter Soldier—no, _Bucky_ —had simply walked in and started killing anyone that crossed him.

He was merciless: guns, knives, and his metal arm were in constant motion. Each attack hit its target, most of whom stayed down after a single shot.

Bucky was a magnificent fighting force. Steve had been impressed by the Winter Soldier before he knew the man’s identity: his movements were beautiful, dancelike.

Then, Hydra agents started appearing out of nowhere. There were so many men that even the Winter Soldier was nearly overpowered.

Someone shouted at Bucky—the tapes didn’t have sound, but Steve could their mouth moving—and Bucky fell to his knees.

It was only a moment, but the damage was done. Mag cuffs were clamped around his wrists and ankles.

He thrashed against the bonds. Ten people had to hold him down.

Guns were fired.

Steve felt a phantom pain for every bullet that entered his friend’s body.

He couldn’t help the shameful rush of relief that, at the very least, Bucky was spared the indignity of having his memories wiped again. Of being made into Hydra’s pet assassin again.

He could feel Sam’s eyes on him. He couldn’t look away from the image of his friend dead in a Hydra facility.

“Steve—”

“I need to find him.”

“Steve, there’s no way he—”

“I know.”

The mag cuffs were opened, but the prone form didn’t fight, didn’t move, didn’t live.

“I know,” he repeated.

The footage showed them dragging Bucky out of the building, and, on another screen Steve could just see them digging a grave, throwing him in like a discarded doll.

\--

Sam let him work on his own, choosing instead to sift through whatever information had been left behind. At some point, Natasha showed up, but neither of them tried to stop Steve.

\--

Steve _needs_ to find Bucky. He can’t believe Bucky is dead until he sees the body, until he feels the stillness in his friend’s chest. He abandoned Bucky when he fell from the train in the Alps. It was his fault that Hydra made Bucky into their plaything in the first place. It _is_ his fault that Bucky is currently lying in a shallow grave with a bullet in his brain.

He pauses and sighs. His hands and arms hurt, but he doesn’t want to use a shovel and risk desecrating Bucky’s body any further. He doesn’t want to risk hurting his friend any more.

He doesn’t want to lose what’s left of his life before he was a national icon, even if one of the people he has left is dying slowly in a nursing home and the other is dead and buried in a shallow grave.

After all, Bucky and Peggy are his last connections to the man he used to be. To who he was before the world knew him as Captain America, instead of as a skinny kid from Brooklyn.

Steve hears someone approaching, and turns to see Natasha behind him.

“Hey,” she says, kneeling beside him. When he doesn’t answer, she reaches out to hold his hand. “This isn’t your fault, you know.”

“We both know that’s not true.”

“He chose to stay hidden. You did everything you could to find him, but he knew how to disappear and he didn’t want to be found.”

Steve’s getting tired of everyone telling him he isn’t responsible for this.

“I know you want to blame yourself for this, but that won’t help anyone.”

“What if I’m tired of helping?” he demands bitterly. “What if, just once, I want to put my own problems first? What if I want to grieve for him—for Peggy—for the life I never got to live with either of them?”

Natasha should be angry at him for his outburst, but she just squeezes his hand and presses herself against his side. “That’s fine, but someone has to take care of you, and I know _you_ won’t.”

She’s right, but Steve refuses to admit that aloud.

“I know you won’t ask for help, but let us know when you find him, okay?”

He nods and stares at the ground while Natasha walks away. Once she’s gone, he starts to dig again.

The soil shifts beneath him, occasionally collapsing in on itself in tiny avalanches. It almost looks like something is coming up from the earth to meet him.

He reaches down to scrape out more dirt when something brushes against his fingers.

He freezes.

Steve can’t breathe; he forces himself to ignore the whirlwind of emotions rising up in his chest.

Feeling around where he’d felt the movement, he finds something that isn’t earth.

It’s a hand—a flesh and bone _hand_.

It isn’t possible—there’s _no way_ he feels a pulse beneath the skin.

“Please…” he whispers to the darkness, hoping against hope.

His hands move without another thought. Following the outline of the body, he removes the dirt from his friend’s head and neck, then moves down to Bucky’s chest and over to his arms and legs.

Blue-grey eyes open slowly, and Steve can see the dim but sparkling lights of the entire night sky reflected in them.

“Bucky?” he asks breathlessly, cradling his friend’s face between his hands.

He looks over the wounds. The execution shot definitely went through Bucky’s skull, but here he is, _alive_ , despite everything.

Bucky had been silently regarding Steve, but Steve’s concern seems to distress him. “I will heal,” he says.

After all this time, after everything he’s been through, Bucky’s _still_ looking out for Steve.

“How?” Steve whispers. How can Bucky be alive? How can he care about Steve when he’s been lying dead in a shallow grave for three days? How can Steve be worthy of Bucky?

Bucky starts to cough, so Steve gets the bottle of water he’d brought to the grave and helps his friend drink from it.

The only reason he’d had the water in the first place was to clean Bucky’s body, to try and wash away some of the horrors his friend had lived through and eventually been killed by.

Instead, the water quenches his friend’s thirst, heals him like Steve never could.

The bottle empty, Steve just holds Bucky, afraid that letting go will mean the dream will end and he’ll be left alone again, his best friend and first love dead in the ground. Bucky doesn’t seem disturbed by Steve’s scrutiny. He just looks up at the blond, his pale skin almost ghostly in the moonlight.

When Steve woke up on the shore of the Potomac, he’d worried that his best friend was dead, even if Bucky was still technically alive. Bucky had been through hell, had been ripped to shreds and put back together at the whims of monsters, and Steve feared that, no matter how many reports he read, no matter how many Hydra agents he interrogated, Steve could never do anything to rectify any of it.

But, looking down at his friend, he realizes how wrong he’d been to think that.

With the exception of his long hair and the stubble on his face, Bucky almost looks the same. His body is more muscular than before and his eyes have aged with years that Steve can never know, but Steve still knows _him_ , can remember every line on his face, every contour of his body. He may not have been physically present for Bucky’s suffering, but their souls are entwined.

Steve had mourned the loss of Bucky as the one of the last people who knew him before the serum, but he had forgotten that he’s the only person left who knew _Bucky_ before everything. Before Hydra made him into a weapon, before Zola experimented on him, before Bucky was shipped off to Europe to be used as cannon fodder.

Steve was there when Bucky got into his first fight—a fight Steve himself had started—and won. He was there for the two hour-long lecture from all three of their parents. He was there every time Bucky found out his mother was going to have another baby. He was there when Bucky held his sisters for the first time.

When Rose Blackwood left Bucky even though they’d been together long enough that he had been thinking about proposing, Steve was the one who tried to cheer Bucky up by asking for help with dating, even though Steve himself had no interest in it, because he knew Bucky would be distracted by trying to bring him on double dates. Steve even suggested they take art classes together, so they could spend more time in each other’s company.

They were at one of those art classes when they found out about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

That day, they enlisted side-by-side, and only Bucky was accepted. But Steve could see that Bucky was trying to hide his fear behind a mask of bravado.

So _Steve_ was the one who took their relationship to a new level when he kissed Bucky that night. Was the one who told Bucky how much he loved him and how scared he was of losing the most important person in his world.

But _Bucky_ was the one who moved their love to the bedroom, where they lay, kissing, until the sun came up the next morning.

Steve was the reason Bucky wanted to survive the war. Steve was the person Bucky wanted to come home to.

Bucky was the one who told Steve it was okay if he wanted to pursue Peggy. Steve responded that he had enough love for both of them in his heart, and both of them understood and accepted it.

Bucky was all of Steve’s firsts: his first friend, his first kiss, his first time making love, his first time losing love.

Steve is one of the only people to have ever known how deep their love ran.

“I thought you were dead,” he says.

How could Steve have been so wrong?

Bucky could never die as long as Steve was alive, nor could Steve ever die while Bucky lived, because the love they felt for each other kept the other alive, even if one heart stopped beating, the other could beat for two.

Even Hydra’s theft of Bucky’s memories couldn’t kill their feelings for one another.

“I thought you were smaller,” Bucky replies.

Steve can’t believe Bucky remembers that, and feels himself smile at the memory of another time Bucky defied all odds and survived for him.

Bucky reaches up and pulls Steve closer and closer until their lips meet.

Steve breathes in the scent of blood and dirt and _Bucky_.

After all these years, after everything Hydra did to him, he still smells the same.

The kiss is chaste, but Steve has never felt anything so intimate, so sublime, so holy.

He wants to stay like for hours, for _years_. He wants the last thing he ever knows to be Bucky.

All too soon, the kiss ends. Steve presses their foreheads together.

He can feel Bucky breathing against his chest, can feel the air as it ghosts over his lips, can feel his heart beating in time with Steve’s own, and he finally, _finally_ allows himself to believe that this may be real.

Relief floods him.

His heart feels too large, the air in his lungs is simultaneously overpowering and inadequate, his skin feels full to bursting with emotion. Steve wants to scream, wants to hold Bucky in his arms until they become one, but he settles for simply letting himself weep for the first time since he woke up in a future he never asked for.

The tears cling to Steve’s lashes, only to fall to Bucky’s cheeks, where each one washes away some of the dirt coating his skin.

Bucky caresses his cheek and smooths away Steve’s tears. “’Wherefore I say unto thee,’” he whispers as Steve’s tears cling to his metal hand. “’Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.’”

There’s no reason the Winter Soldier would have needed to know bible verses. That means Bucky remembers at least _some_ of their childhood, when so much time was spent in church: the hours studying for Sacraments, the years they were altar servers, the ages spent saying prayer after prayer after confession because Steve had gotten them in a fight _again_.

Steve smiles damply. “I’m not crying on your feet, Buck. And don’t think I’m going to dry you off with my hair.”

He would, though, if Bucky told him to. Steve would do anything for Bucky. He would walk to the ends of the earth if Bucky led him there, he would die if Bucky commanded it, he would live again if Bucky asked.

When he lost Bucky the first time, Steve can remember wanting to burn the world, to wipe out the scourge that was Hydra.

Learning of the horrors with which Hydra violated Bucky caused his rage to suffocate him. Every cell in his body was consumed by it, and Steve could think only of revenge.

Now, Steve’s love for Bucky fills him. The weight of his anger will probably never lift away from his heart—Bucky used to say he came out of the womb angry—but it no longer overburdens him.

Now, he has something to live for other than revenge, a purpose other than destruction, a mission that has nothing to do with killing.

For the first time in years—in _decades_ —Steve thinks he may be forgiven, he thinks he may be absolved of his sins.

This absolution, brought on by sheer closeness to another flawed, broken human, should feel sacrilegious—Christ himself could not bring the peace to Steve this has given him—but Steve has always been grounded by Bucky.

Steve lost his faith in Christ, but he could never lose faith in Bucky

Bucky is as constant to him as North, as crucial as breathing, as needed as sustenance.

He is the air Steve breathes, the blood in Steve’s veins. The sky above him, the ground below.

His world.

His universe.

His _everything_.

**Author's Note:**

> Bucky quotes [Luke: 36-50](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+7%3A36-50&version=KJV) from the King James Version of the bible. The story is that of the [Anointing of Jesus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anointing_of_Jesus), where a sinful woman weeps on Christ's feet and then dries them with her hair. 
> 
> I also drew inspiration from Hozier's 'Take Me to Church', 'In a Week', and 'Cherry Wine'.
> 
>  
> 
> [my tumblr](http://lourdesdeath.tumblr.com/)


End file.
